The disclosure relates generally to turbomachines, and more particularly, to adjacent flow path components, such as assemblies for radially adjacent airfoils in a gas turbine.
Turbomachines, such as gas turbines, include one or more rows of airfoils, including stationary airfoils referred to as stator vanes and rotating airfoils referred to as rotor blades or buckets. A gas turbine may include an axial compressor at the front, one or more combustors around the middle, and a turbine at the rear. Typically, an axial compressor has a series of stages with each stage comprising a row of rotor blades followed by a row of stationary stator vanes. Accordingly, each stage generally comprises a pair of rotor blades and stator vanes. Typically, the rotor blades increase the kinetic energy of a fluid that enters the axial compressor through an inlet and the stator vanes convert the increased kinetic energy of the fluid into static pressure through diffusion. Accordingly, both sets of airfoils play a vital role in increasing the pressure of the fluid.
In the case of rotor blades, the ring of airfoils are connected to an inner shaft at the base of the airfoils to form the ring. In many applications, it is not practical to manufacture an integral ring of rotor blades. Thus, each rotor blade in the ring may be produced independently, often including an integral base section with a shank and a dovetail portion. The rotor blades may then be assembled into the complete ring by inserting the dovetail portions into the complementary slots in a disk (rotor wheel) that will form a portion of the shaft and connect to adjacent (in the axial direction) stages.
When assembling adjacent rotor blades, the resulting assembly may include small gaps between the shanks of adjacent blades that could provide an undesirable fluid leak path. In some assemblies an aft radial seal is installed substantially perpendicular to the axial direction between adjacent shanks to reduce the leak path and a damper pin is installed substantially parallel to the axial direction and designed to further limit leakage. Other seal configurations for limiting leakage between adjacent shanks are also used in producing rotor blade assemblies.
Rotor blade assemblies are used in a variety of applications, including land based gas turbines, jet engines, high speed ship engines, small scale power stations, or the like. Similar rotor blade assemblies may be used in other applications, such as large volume air separation plants, blast furnace air, fluid cracking air, propane dehydrogenation, or other industrial applications.